I believe I am going to make the unit all electric preventing the need to meter out the gas.  

Laws are now passed that prevent you from renting to yourself and claiming all the losses.

When I go through with this strategy in the future, I will be doing a thorough vetting process to try and avoid unnecessary headaches.

My thought is is use the Rent Ready feature of reporting his payment history to the credit bureau so it can work in his favor as a trade line, but I'm wondering if this is an unnecessary added step since he can already pull transactions on his bank side. 

This would help ensure that we take the appropriate steps to address the issue and prevent it from happening again in the future.If it turns out that my unit is the source, I will take responsibility and address it promptly.

Moving forward blindly on that deal would have put our investors money at risk, which isn't an option, so WE took a $60k haircut to prevent that.

Otherwise, you could also provide prevention recommendations somewhere on the lease that includes what you've mentioned above.Assuming you don't have a lawyer to help with your rental agreement you can find some sample clauses on a site such as Law Insider.

Plus, Zillow, Rentler and the other real estate platforms tend to have all sorts of unnecessary hoops to jump through for landlords, and I find a lot of their design very un-intuitive (I remember spending waaayyy too much time just trying to figure out simple things in Rentler).  ...why can't they make it easier?

Make sure you understand the basic math, what qualifies as a good investment, how to manage your investment and prevent losses, etc.I would start with Set For Life by Scott Trench.

If the tenants leave cereal boxes out and the house gets overrun with ants, it's still your responsibility as the landlord to have pest control in place to prevent or treat the problem.